Insights on Ulster

Press, 18 February 1978, Page 13

Insights on Ulster

The Narrow Ground: Aspects ot Ulster 1609-1969. By A. T. Q. Stewart. Faber and Faber. 208 pp. $l4. (Reviewed by Richard Corballis)

Dr Stewart’s book begins with an “Author’s Note” to which all readers should pay close attention. “I have assumed,” he writes, “that the reader already knows the outlines of Irish history and something of the events in Northern Ireland since 1969.” He means it. This is not a book for beginners. While Dr Stewart remains laudably impartial about the Ulster question, his approach to writing exhibits unmistakable traces of Presbyterian parsimony which will frustrate the uninitiated. Earlier in the “Author’s Note” Dr Stewart defines his book as an "essay" about “five aspects of Ulster history since 1609.” This should be read with the emphasis on “five aspects” rather than on "essay.” At first glance the book certainly looks like a unified historical “essay” — each of the five sections is centred on a significant

historical episode, and these episodes are treated in chronological order. But in fact the "five aspects” are so diverse in kind that the book is reallv five essays rather than one, and the reader is continually required to make radical changes of focus. For example, whereas the second section (“Signals of Siege” is basically a simple history of sectarian warfare in Derry, the first section (“Problems of Plantation”) is virtually an exercise in anthropology, in which Dr Stewart disposes of the popular notion that the Ulster problem is essentially a conflict between the native Gaels and the foreign planters introduced by James I in 1610. Part Three (“The Politics of Presbytery") is quite different again; here the reader is forced to grapple with some very complex legal and theological material And so it goes on. The material itself is generally excellent and should provoke much fresh thought about Ulster, but one could wish that a few more concessions had been made to the reader in the manner of presentation.